The Adventures of a Forty-niner - An Historic Description of California, with Events and Ideas of San Francisco and Its People in Those Early Days by Daniel Knower
page 29 of 99 (29%)
page 29 of 99 (29%)
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at the landing, nobody that wanted a job to carry your baggage. Governor
Shannon, of Ohio, was among the passengers. He had been minister to Mexico, yet he had to carry his own baggage, and make several trips to do it. One of the passengers assisted him. He was president of a mining company organized in Ohio. It was evening. We stopped at a hotel, and I slept in my Mackinaw blanket that I carried with me, on the dining-room floor. The next morning after breakfast, about 9 o'clock, I went out on the front portico to take observations of the place. The landlord was there. There was a loaferish-looking fellow going by on the opposite side of the street. The landlord cries out to him: "Bill, what will you charge to chop wood for me from now until night?" He cries back, "What will you give?" He replies, "$10." Bill answers back, "Can't chop for less than an ounce," which was $16, and walked right on. It was evident that common labor was not suffering there for want of employment. I was there some days, and could find no one to post me how to get to Coloma. All was excitement and bustle. While there, Sam. Brannan--who had built a new hotel there (just finished), called the City Hotel--gave a free entertainment for one day to the public. He must have expended $1,000 for refreshments. He had been a Mormon preacher, and was a captain in Colonel Stevenson's regiment. He was very enterprising and generous, a prominent figure with the "Forty-niners." I saw an article in the paper a few years ago from a California correspondent, giving a biography of him; that he was, at one time, worth several millions, and went into some big enterprise--which I cannot now recall--and was unfortunate and lost all his wealth, and that he was, at that time, in San Francisco at a twenty-five-cent lodging-house, and that he told him that he passed two men that day who |
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